The Immortal Journeys of Isabelle Eberhardt: A Biography - Paperback

by Hédi A. Jaouad (Author)

"Inspiring, exquisitely researched, and deftly written. I loved it." --Elizabeth Gilbert, author, Eat, Pray, Love

In this powerful new biography, the radical adventuress Isabelle Eberhardt emerges as a brilliant modern figure who lived on her own terms--crossing boundaries of gender, faith, empire, and identity.

In The Immortal Journeys of Isabelle Eberhardt, eminent literary scholar Hédi A. Jaouad offers a bold reexamination of the Swiss-born writer and adventurer whose short life (1877-1904) has long been romanticized, misread, or exoticized.
Jaouad explores Eberhardt's spatial existence--dizzyingly mobile, vividly immersive--from a precocious outcast in Geneva to a shape-shifting wanderer in colonial North Africa who lived disguised as an Arab man, converted to Islam, joined a Sufi brotherhood, and fiercely challenged the moral and political boundaries of her time.

As Publishers Weekly raved, "Once dismissed as an eccentric, Eberhardt emerges here as a visionary who embodied the spirit of adventure through her nonconformist life. It's a vivid portrait of a revolutionary."

Sexually ambiguous, spiritually uncontainable, and politically subversive, Eberhardt's life was lived in deliberate defiance of colonial norms and gendered expectations. Yet she remains difficult to categorize: part saint, part scandal, part cipher. Jaouad's approach neither sanitizes her kif-fueled escapades nor sensationalizes her untimely death in a flash flood at Aïn Séfra. Instead, he shows how her lived experience was always tethered to the landscapes she inhabited.

For readers captivated by outsider lives, feminist iconoclasts, and the search for personal sovereignty, The Immortal Journeys of Isabelle Eberhardt is a landmark biography. It lets Eberhardt emerge not as a symbol or mirage, but as a fiercely real figure--forever on the move, and more relevant now than ever.

Author Biography

Hédi A. Jaouad is a Professor emeritus of French and Francophone Studies at Skidmore College. His areas of specialization include francophone literature, twentieth-century French literature, history and theory of criticism, comparative literature and African film. He is the author of six books and serves as editor-in-chief of Revue CELAAN, a biannual journal on North African literature, published by the Center for the Studies of the Literatures and Arts of North Africa. He lives in New York.